“You got us,” said Mai, and then she turned to Alice: “You know, if you told me your name out there in Dead-Hogville, I forgot it, silly me.”
“Alice,” said Alice. “Alice Marie Krayenbraak.”
“Wow, that’s a mouthful,” said Mai.
When Alice had first seen the Vangs sitting in their station wagon, they had looked small—but not as small as they looked now. Straightening up to greet them had been a mistake. Alice felt like a giraffe, but Mai’s eyes were so bright and confident that she could have been six feet tall.
“This is my mother, Lia, and this is my younger brother, Nickson,” she repeated for everyone. The Rev stood by, nodding.
“Wassup?” said Nickson and did a little hand wave that Alice recognized as the same one he had given from the passenger seat in their station wagon. He shuffled a little toward his sister’s side, grinned and nodded. He was maybe two inches taller than Mai, about five-five, but his shoulders were broad for his height. All of them had heavy eyelids that lifted their eyebrows high on their foreheads. The mother’s face was round, but Mai and Nickson were narrow faced with full lips.
Mother Lia held out her hand and looked somewhere in the area of Alice and Lydia’s knees. She was even shorter than her children.
“Thank you,” she said.
“So pleased to meet you,” said Lydia.
“Same here,” said Alice, “I mean to really meet you.”
Alice and Lydia stood in place as sentries in front of the humiliating bumper sticker, but Mai moved in closer to Alice and Lydia as if she thought they were the shy ones.
“Are you at Redemption?” she said.
“No, we’re still in high school,” said Lydia.
“We’re both at Midwest Christian,” said Alice.
“Oh, just like Nickson.”
Mai’s eyes looked past them and directly at the bumper sticker. She cocked her head. She read the bumper sticker aloud, but with a question-mark lilt at the end: “If You’re Not Dutch, You’re Not Much?”
There was a stiff silence.
Alice tried to take a breath but couldn’t. “We’re kind of weird,” came her voice from somewhere.
Alice looked down into Mai’s bright eyes and felt ridiculously tall and awkward, but Mai’s eyes did not shift and her friendly expression did not change. Their height difference didn’t bother her one bit, and neither did Alice’s blushing face.
“If you’re not Dutch, you’re not much? Not much what?” said Mai.
“Good question,” said the Rev—and they all joined in a relieved ripple of chuckles.
Alice saw a trace of farm dirt under her fingernails as they peeled back the edge of the bumper sticker with its white background and blue printing that imitated the colors of Delft china. “I’ll just get rid of that thing,” she said and gave it a quick yank. It stuck together on itself as she rolled it into a ball in her palm.
“Good job. Good riddance,” said Lydia, and gave Alice a gentle punch.
“Hey, that was the Vander Muiden’s van,” said the Rev in the voice of Jeremiah.
“Still is,” said Lydia.
The Krayenbraaks’ Taurus idled impatiently across the parking lot with Alice’s father staring in her direction while her mother stared straight ahead through the windshield. Aldah’s pink-lipped face looked out smiling from the backseat. Alice excused herself to leave the Rev to clean up the pieces of whatever had been started with the Vangs. Mai kept smiling. She held out her hand to shake Alice’s and Lydia’s. So did Nickson. Their mother smiled and held out her hand too.
Whatever the bumper sticker had meant to the Vangs, it didn’t intimidate them. Unless they really knew how to hide their feelings, it didn’t even phase them.
“That was an experience,” said Lydia as they walked away.
“Those two guys?”
“We can do better than that,” said Lydia. “I meant the Vangs. They’re interesting. Did you watch Nickson?”
“He seemed shy,” said Alice.
“He wasn’t shy about the way he looked at you.”
“Give me a break,” said Alice. “I must be over a half foot taller than he is.”
“We all look up to you, darling.”
As Alice walked toward the Taurus, she knew she and Lydia had entered a new circle of energy with the Vangs, a whole different kind of cultural fire than they were used to. These people, especially Mai, were fired up inside and wearing an invisible shield on the outside. They probably would have to tame down that foreign fire in Dutch Center, but the invisible shield? They’d need that.
When Alice got into the car, neither of her parents asked about the Vangs, but Alice sensed an unease. Even if both of her parents would argue vehemently that they held no prejudices against foreigners, Alice knew better. The Mexicans who had moved in to work at the dairies and packing plants attended a Catholic church ten miles from Dutch Center, so no one had to experience the strangeness of seeing them in the next pew. Out of sight, out of mind. Occasionally a missionary convert from Africa would appear in their church, but their visits were always short; and there were a handful of foreign students attending Redemption College, but few of them attended Alice’s church. The Vangs were a rarity, and seeing them no doubt stirred the calm waters of her parents’ habitual church comforts.
Alice could feel the space around her compact with silence in the backseat of the car with Aldah. It wasn’t the kind of silence that suggested her parents had quarreled about the way her mother stormed out of church. This was different—a pressured silence that was building up in the front seat. Alice suspected the silence had everything to do with the Vangs, but she wasn’t about to open the conversation on that topic. Instead, she would meet their silence with her own and simply stare out the window.
Which she did: in a casual analytic mode, she categorized the farms as they passed by. Successful farms. Teetering farms. Abandoned farms. Successful farms were like people wearing expensive clothing—not showy, just that confident look of neatly buttoned doors and well-groomed roofs, the kind of farms that would appear on the covers of farm magazines. The teetering farms were like people wearing mismatched clothing—a shining tractor next to a gate that nobody bothered to repair. The abandoned farms had no pretense at all, disheveled but carefree with their tall grass and their splintered doors wagging in the breeze like shirttails that someone didn’t bother tucking in. Abandoned farms were like homeless hitchhikers ready to take a ride from anybody who passed.
Alice knew that the Krayenbraak farm was a teetering farm but it didn’t have any mismatched clothing. Its troubles were hidden behind a facade of order and tidiness: no loose hinges, no loose barbed wire, no loose shingles.
Three miles from the Krayenbraak farm her father stopped the car at a “cornfield corner,” an intersection where the cornfields obstructed the view in all four directions. Alice thought for a moment that he was simply being his cautious self or that he might be stopping to appreciate the beauty of the flourishing cornfields, but then she saw her mother’s shoulders tighten and knew this was the moment they had chosen for the dam of silence to be broken.
4
As her father drove slowly through the intersection, the dam broke with her mother’s sharp-edged voice from the front seat: “Do those people speak English?”
“Of course,” said Alice quickly. “Nickson will be at Midwest and Mai will be at Redemption. You know that. She has a scholarship.”
“The